The Elder Scrolls

[Acrux]

Actually Kirkbride is an overrated hack

Yes

:rolleyes:

Well, if you like the ramblings of drug addicted coomers he's okay I guess

[maidenhaver]

Yes

:rolleyes:

Well, if you like the ramblings of drug addicted coomers he's okay I guess

I dislike the resentment of sober opinion-havers even more.

[KnightoftheWind]

Ah well, in two years time we'll be crapping on the initial trailers and screenshots for ES VI anyway. The franchise is doomed to fail, one way or the other, and we all know it. No fans of any version of Elder Scrolls will have a good time with this one, not after Starfield. No way no how, you can't recover from a game like that.

It'll sell, but it will sell a few million less than Skyrim and that will set a worrying trend for the future of Bethesda and it's current management. Microsoft and it's shareholders will see the writing on the wall, and recommend some decisive action by Phil Spencer. Which means more layoffs, Emil Pagliarulo's final departure, and Todd Howard taking on a different role at the company. More of an advisory one, no doubt, with little influence on the day-to-day goings on. Microsoft spent far too much on this company and has yet to recover any of it. They invested in them thinking they got a guarenteed golden ticket, and will mismanage it all to hell in corporate fashion. Then once the dried husk has nothing left, sit on the IPs until the 2100s when they finally enter the Public Domain, and our descendants descendants can play a minimalist, indie sprite art version on their VR pods.

[rusty_shackleford]

some decisive action by Phil Spencer.

didn't they replace him with a black woman?

[maidenhaver]

Bethesda's going to die quiet. Maybe Todd and Hines will get to keep playing Madden in the back of a wawa.

[Vergil]

Yes

:rolleyes:

Well, if you like the ramblings of drug addicted coomers he's okay I guess

The degeneracy aside I just don't like how overblown his reputation is. He wrote a few (admittedly pretty good) lore books in Morrowind and a bunch of schizo ramblings outside of the games in the years after. He definitely has a chip on his shoulder too. The "Tiber Septim was one an orc" thing came from a reddit thread where people were speculating on Tiber's race uses sources and inferences from information we had and he of course had to enter the thread and fart out some nonsense about there being 24 Tiber Septims one of which was an orc. Don't know about anyone else but I don't care for "lore" that is just bullshit made up on the spot out of spite.

[KnightoftheWind]

some decisive action by Phil Spencer.

didn't they replace him with a black woman?

Apparently Xbox is now a part of a new "Microsoft Gaming" division, and is now headed up by Alan Hartman. According to Wikipedia. Didn't even know about that until now.

[rusty_shackleford]

some decisive action by Phil Spencer.

didn't they replace him with a black woman?

Yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Bond_(executive)

[maidenhaver]

Does Alan Hartman identify as a black woman?

[KnightoftheWind]

some decisive action by Phil Spencer.

didn't they replace him with a black woman?

Yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Bond_(executive)

But then who's the guy listed here?. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_Game_Studios

Maybe she's vice president to the President of Xbox, who reports to Phil.

[rusty_shackleford]

didn't they replace him with a black woman?

Yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Bond_(executive)

But then who's the guy listed here?. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_Game_Studios

Maybe she's vice president to the President of Xbox, who reports to Phil.

On October 26, 2023, Microsoft announced the promotion of several employees in the company, including Sarah Bond being promoted to president of Xbox, overseeing all Xbox platform, business, and hardware work

[KnightoftheWind]

Well in that case, Bethesda is screwed. Time to find another franchise...Tainted Grail, anyone?.

[maidenhaver]

She is your xbox queen. Present your nuts to be stomped, console boy.

[maidenhaver]

Well in that case, Bethesda is screwed. Time to find another franchise...Tainted Grail, anyone?.

No, man. Its over. Piracy is the franchise.

[KnightoftheWind]

Piracy is worthless if nothing is actually worth pirating. And that is assuming they don't add copious amounts of intrusive DRM. Right now it's Denuvo, but they aren't going to stop there. And eventually everything will be tied to a subscription service that's running off of a cloud server, what then?. Are we going to send you or Rusty in a ski mask and hack the servers, and send the data to a Russian guy thousands of kilometres away?.

[maidenhaver]

These are difficult times, I don't have all the answers.

[KnightoftheWind]

These are difficult times, I don't have all the answers.

If there's a future left in gaming, it isn't going to be in piracy. It's going to be in community-run endeavors, or indie games made by those dedicated to DRM-free entertainment. These old developers and these old franchises are done at this point, they are never going to be good again. Best we can do is preserve them with things like OpenMW, and move on. Heck I'm more excited for Skywind and Skyblivion than I ever will be for ES VI. When I speak of ES VI, it's in jest only.

[maidenhaver]

I don't believe in community endeavors.

[Vergil]

Heck I'm more excited for Skywind and Skyblivion than I ever will be for ES VI.

I'm not sure about the Skyblivion team but I'm pretty sure the Skywind team are full of troons. Not that it matters, Skyblivion, Beyond Skyrim, all those big mod projects are forever NEVER EVER coming out anyway. Only one I have a modicum of faith in is Skyblivion.

[rusty_shackleford]

Something to be said about troons being eternally stuck as children trying to relive their youth.

[KnightoftheWind]

I bet they're all full of troons, but at least they stand a chance at releasing something half decent. That's what matters. Tell me a project that doesn't have at least one troon on the team and I'd be shocked.

[rusty_shackleford]

Tell me a project that doesn't have at least one troon on the team and I'd be shocked.

arx libertatis

[Vergil]

[rusty_shackleford]

Explains why these projects seem to have a near 50% failure rate then.

[Vergil]

Explains why these projects seem to have a near 50% failure rate then.

If only the failure rate was that low. How many of these projects have actually been finished? All I can think of is Morroblivion, New California and The Frontier. Not exactly a list of winners either.

[Tweed]

ITT: Rusty gets big mad about Morrowind, again.

[Wretch]

Give me an Elder Scrolls game set entirely within a big realistically sized city with Radiant AI 2.0 and little/no outside world or give me death

Has bethesda ever made a big city that wasn't "eh" at best? Vivec is fucking horrible in Morrowind and Mournhold is extremely barren and empty.

Daggerfall is full of good cities and hilariously enough they’re procedurally generated. Also Morrowind wasn’t a step down from daggerfall, it’s a better game in many ways. The only place morrowind really messed up was on the orcs and breton lore.

[Vergil]

Give me an Elder Scrolls game set entirely within a big realistically sized city with Radiant AI 2.0 and little/no outside world or give me death

Has bethesda ever made a big city that wasn't "eh" at best? Vivec is fucking horrible in Morrowind and Mournhold is extremely barren and empty.

Daggerfall is full of good cities and hilariously enough they’re procedurally generated. Also Morrowind wasn’t a step down from daggerfall, it’s a better game in many ways. The only place morrowind really messed up was on the orcs and breton lore.

I think good is a bit of a stretch. They're passable cozy little towns but their layout can be retarded due to generation and rarely are they particularly interesting in terms of appearance and what you can do in them.

[maidenhaver]

None of the cities they've made were worth a damn except as hubs for quests. That's ok, except the stores suck, the quests are weak, and they like to put a lot of effort into unique-looking cities.

Morrowind's cities can get away with being outposts, because at the time of the game, Vvardenfell has only been legal to settle for a few years. Its a frontier for losers.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I'm not excited for TES 6. One of my main issues with the franchise is that I don't find it aesthetically appealing or the setting to be interesting. The most unique you got was Morrowind, with the feuding Elven clans dwelling in an ashen wasteland wearing crab armor and wizards living in mushroom trees and stuff. But then that game was followed up by generic green hills and stone castles (instead of the really intriguing jungle with dragons bathing in red rivers and magical talking shrub gardens and stuff talked about in a book), and then followed up by generic viking snow land. And ESO looks awful. The Fallout and Starfield games also look meh too. So I expect TES 6 to look bad (again talking about setting and art direction here, not graphical fidelity or ray tracing or polygons or whatever), which is a shame given that VIDEO GAMES are an audio-visual medium. Good visuals are imperative. Also, Jeremy Soule had the misfortune to become the victim of cancel culture, and his dreamlike music was a core part of the series (again, audio-visuals).

So the audio-visuals are meh, so what you're left is the gameplay which leaves a lot to be desired. At least the frustration of Morrowind where you swing your sword at a mob 20 times and only hit once is gone, but it's still not fun. I haven't heard anything transformative about the Fallout or Starfield games so I doubt there will be any significant innovation for TES 6 either.